An interrogation of consultant-driven curriculum design in Lesotho: Primary school science curriculum design.

Abstract

In 1978 National Dialogue in Lesotho, Basotho requested education that would build a Basotho nation with its own identity and specific destiny in life that would instill values and attitudes consistent with a Basotho way. One of the strategies to address these demands was to train more Basotho to spearhead Lesotho education system especially curriculum design and development. Like any other underdeveloped African country, Lesotho lacked skills to achieve its objective and had to import expertise from other countries in the form of consultancy. But the involvement of foreign consultants in the Lesotho curriculum design and development has been in operation since the beginning of formal education in the country to-date. The expectation was that, with time, the country would produce enough quality curriculum specialists, and the engagement of foreign consultants would end. This study assesses the issues of foreign consultants’ involvement in designing the Lesotho primary school Grade 4 science curriculum. Curriculum specialists mandated to design Lesotho curriculum and two foreign consultants engaged to assist curriculum specialists at time of study provided most of data for this research through one-on-one interviews. Another data was produced through document analysis of old school science Standard 4 syllabus (as it was called) and the new integrated curriculum for Grade 4. In order to interpret data, the researcher utilized the concept quality in which I interrogated the quality of curriculum specialists, foreign consultants and the quality of documents produced by both curriculum specialists and foreign consultants. The results show that one of the main reasons for engaging foreign consultants is the collapse of training for newly employed curriculum specialists while on the other hand, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) employs less qualified and inexperienced curriculum specialists since the Centre (NCDC) is unable to retain or attract highly qualified curriculum specialists. This resulted in the lack of knowledge of curriculum design and curriculum specialists are accused of taking too long to design a low quality curriculum.